


Wilshire

by threesmallcrows



Category: Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Los Angeles, Made Tour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-10 05:26:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4378970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seunghyun likes fairytales. Seungri is a crime princeling. Youngbae doesn't kill on Sunday. Daesung comes from nowhere.</p><p>And Jiyong, Jiyong is Leader.</p><p>Inspired by the Made Tour trailer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Wilshire is five colors. Blonde. Blue. White. Brown. Pink.

 

No Orange. There are no traitors in this operation.

 

**I. BLONDE**

 

Seunghyun likes fairytales.

 

Seunghyun is also crazy, which is why it is very, very important that the book be accounted for at all times.

 

This, like many things, falls to Jiyong. He doesn’t mind. Fifteen years is long enough for it to be more a habit than a conscious effort. He is Leader. This is what he does.

 

He throws the suitcase into the trunk. Climbs into the driver’s seat and checks the glovebox, second habit. The book is there. All is well.

 

Seunghyun is riding with him into the desert today. He crawls into the passenger seat, limbs too long for Jiyong’s sleek little beast. He turns the radio on without asking and jangles along in time to the music. Every rap song that comes on, he knows the words to, and no matter how hard the beats run they can’t outrun him.

 

Their oldest member is a savant who was considered an idiot at ten and killed his first at twelve. Even in their world of lions, people are afraid of Seunghyun. Jiyong isn’t. Seunghyun is older than him but Seunghyun is his little brother. People tell him behind Seunghyun’s back that he’s good at managing him. Leader stares at these people, straight-lipped. He doesn’t manage anything. Just loves Seunghyun fiercely even when he’s covered in blood, dazed and smiling.

 

Seunghyun tells him a long story about two people he saw on a train and Jiyong nods, half-listening. An hour into the drive he settles into the quiet steady rumble of ninety-an-hour. His huge hands make their way deftly into the glovebox and take out the little book. Dense German in Gothic print, illustrations in pastel and ink. Jiyong knows that Seunghyun does not know German. Nevertheless, as always, he starts at the beginning and thumbs his way forwards, looking fascinated.

 

Jiyong reaches over the dashboard without taking his eyes off the road and flicks the radio off.

 

**II. BLUE**

 

Seungri was born with a stolen silver spoon in his pretty mouth. Their crime princeling is not hardscrabble like the rest of them. He likes fast cars because they’re pretty; Jiyong likes them because they get him away when he needs to get away. He likes women because they’re pretty. Jiyong doesn’t like women, just respects the clever ones.

 

Seungri likes him, and Jiyong smiles tightly to himself.

 

They don’t get along in the beginning. They’re too different. Jiyong and Youngbae, they’ve worked to get where they are. When they were children they begged for weeks for the big suited men on the streets to take them in. In that desperate city there were swarms of boys who’d fetch your newspapers, polish your shoes, dispose of your bodies. You had to be smart to get ahead. They were, and worked hard, and had the instinct for the business—and they were loyal, knew how to keep their mouths shut and say their yes-sirs and no-sirs.

 

Today both Seungri and Jiyong wear suits, but only Jiyong has scrubbed the floors for them.

 

On the first day he’d told him, “Learn well and work hard,” and Seungri had scoffed.

 

Jiyong hadn’t hesitated to put him in his place. Seungri’s wealth and his bloodline mean nothing to him, although maybe they should—even his bosses have called him, once or twice, and told him in couched terms to take it easy on the young Seunghyun. But they don’t tighten the leash too much. So he continues to take Seungri into hand.

 

Some days Seungri is late. Jiyong goes up to his lush hotel room and kicks in the door. He ignores the naked shrieking girl who leaps up, clutching at the sheets, and focuses on smacking Seungri upside the head. Bewildered and naked, Seungri stares at Jiyong like he’s a god. He is obsessed. Jiyong breathes evenly but Jiyong is uncalm. Jiyong feels good.

 

So it goes. Jiyong does cocaine, but won’t let him; does morphine, won’t let him, picks out clothes for him, keeps an eye on his women.

 

“Don’t get messy over the _maknae_ ,” says Youngbae suddenly one day.

 

Jiyong laughs in place of an answer. Isn’t their _maknae_ a wreck for him?

 

**III. WHITE**

 

Youngbae doesn’t kill on Sunday.

 

On Sundays he tucks his shirt in and goes to church and looks for god.

 

Once or twice, Jiyong wonders what would happen if he were to cross Youngbae on this holy day.

 

The thought moves aside. There is no point in thinking about it, because it will never happen. He and Youngbae are brothers sworn, and friends before brothers. He will face the steel muzzle and bark before he allows Youngbae to die.

 

**IV. BROWN**

 

Daesung comes from hill folk. Daesung comes from nowhere. Nobody knows who Daesung’s people are. Daesung is quick with a knife and a gun and a car. Daesung never misses his mark, and Daesung has a smile and a drawl that refuse to budge.

 

Seunghyun confides in Jiyong that Daesung has come down from the forest.

 

“The forest,” repeats Jiyong. They are on the bathroom floor. Jiyong’s heart is beating out of his ears and he’s listening in fifty-five directions for a footstep while Seunghyun bleeds onto the tiles.

 

His mind flickers to the book. He knows where it is without having to think about it.

 

“In the mountains,” rasps Seunghyun. Jiyong presses the wad of his shirt harder into Seunghyun’s side.

 

“From a town?”

 

“No,” says Seunghyun petulantly. “From the forest.”

 

“Oh yeah? He was raised by wolves?”

 

“Romulus and Remus.”

 

“Is that right.”

 

“He’s a spirit.”

 

“Like a fairy?”

 

“Dunno.”

 

“Is Daesung god?”

 

“Ask Youngbae.”

 

Jiyong laughs.

 

In eight minutes Daesung comes and helps Jiyong drag Seunghyun out. They spin their wheels into the night, and when Jiyong repeats what Seunghyun told him, Daesung laughs and laughs.

 

**V. PINK**

 

As Seunghyun has his little book, so Jiyong has his.

 

He writes at night, on the strength of exactly three cigarettes and cold barley tea afterwards. Not a journal, certainly—nothing that could be incriminating. Something like poetry. Sounds drift in him: engine roar, fire crackle, cards shuffling smoothly, sex, the desert shimmering and cracking midday, waves, neon hum, the quick hard heartbeat of a gun with a silencer, hair salon chatter, high heels, barking, floodlights turning on, gridlock, crickets. Jiyong runs his fingers through his hair until his scalp hurts and writes and writes and writes.

 

“Hey, look at this guy.”

 

Nine in the morning; Youngbae is pointing to someone on the television. Some pop star Jiyong doesn’t recognize. “GD, GD,” prompts Youngbae, but the name means nothing to him.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Well—doesn’t he remind you of you?”

 

Jiyong looks. Maybe. The camera closes in on the singer. His eyes are heavy with makeup, empty and desperate, staring hungrily into the crowd.

 

Jiyong thinks he might look like that, sometimes.


	2. Chapter 2

**VI. WHITE**

 

The car is your carriage and your cage; you make your getaway in it howling with laughter and you burn the midnight oil in it, running ragged across this wide dry nation trying to avoid the blinking song of sirens in the distance.

 

They ride through the wasteland.

 

There’s three kinds of drivers, in their little band. In the middle, Daesung, Jiyong, Seungri. Can handle a car, may even like cars.

 

At the bottom, Seunghyun. The big guy always rides shotgun but never behind the wheel. Maybe it’s lack of aptitude. More likely lack of interest. He rolls down the window and smokes with his head half in the wind like a dog. He looks happier that way.

 

But Youngbae, Youngbae is a class of his own. Cars are animals for him. Living things, soulful. They move with him and under him and when they are wounded he fixes them himself, hands plunged deep in the grease of them like a doctor in surgery.

 

Youngbae says he follows God in all things. A cross dangles from his rearview mirror, superimposed on whichever horizon he’s crossing. But it seems to Jiyong that the wheel is his alone. When the music is high and the sun low and he eases the V8 like butter into a hundred-and-ten an hour, he gets this look in his eye like he can see the route to heaven.

 

Still, skill only gets you so far.

 

They are chased, and in the shake-off they wreck the car beyond repair. The pursuer is in even worse shape, flipped right over on the road. Nothing left of its riders but shells.

 

Jiyong comes back to the sound of his own name. It is Seunghyun, shouting in his ear. When he sees Jiyong’s eyes blink open he nods to himself, satisfied, lopes to the back of the car, and begins shouting for Seungri.

 

Jiyong can’t feel his legs. So he crawls out, on arms that feel halfway out of their sockets.

 

The sun goes out, and he squints upwards into Youngbae’s shadow.

 

“You okay man?”

 

“Yeah,” he grunts. “In a minute. ’s the book?”

 

“Huh? Oh.” Youngbae laughs. “Damn, I’d forgotten.”

 

“Seungri’s alive,” says Seunghyun triumphantly, and from the other side Jiyong hears Daesung give a faint, hoarse cheer.

 

“Injuries?” calls Jiyong, dragging himself upwards on the hanging wreck of a door. Sensation is beginning to trickle into his right leg, if not his left. “We need to get going. Youngbae—glovebox—”

 

He pauses, then, and really surveys the damage.

 

“Don’t think you’re gonna be able to patch this one up,” mutters Daesung.

 

Youngbae look at it, book in gloved hand. His baby.

 

He shrugs.

 

“I’ll buy a new one. It’s no big deal.”

 

**VII. PINK**

 

They bought him the deck of cards as a gag gift. Jiyong is a fidgeter by nature and Seungri jokes that it’s better he play with the cards than the trigger of his gun.

 

He practices all the trick shuffles on them until they wear out, and then he buys himself a better set and practices more.

 

Before a job, he counts them to steady himself. He’ll shuffle the deck and thumb them front-to-back. Four of diamonds, three of spades, queen of spades, ace of hearts. Usually he can get through about half the stack before he forgets the order. He’s getting better at it, though.

 

“What happens when you get to fifty-two?” asks Daesung.

 

Jiyong doesn’t answer. In a moment the cards fly from his hands.

 

“Ah, you’ve messed him up,” taunts Seunghyun.

 

They’re back in Los Angeles again. Dark and glittering and hot and polluted and glamorous and sweaty. They have a pickup, but there’s been a delay farther up the line, so they hole up and wait. The boys fan out because the tension’s too much. Youngbae takes Seunghyun off Jiyong’s hands and vanishes. Daesung goes with Seungri. Jiyong is left on his own.

 

Jiyong watches television. They’ve got Korean channels here. LA, the city of mutts of all breeds. Still, it’s weird to see a bunch of people talking and laughing in his language; people who look like him and think the way he does. The three years he’s been in America feel longer. Sometimes he catches himself thinking in English.

 

They’ll always be foreigners here, on the dint of the color of their skin, let alone the subtler, psychological differences. American crime is highly racialized in a way that would be impossible in the homogeneous Asian nations. The air in the city of angels is already marijuana-thick; there is hardly room for another nation to come butting in. At least he’s established a reputation, even if they call him “that tough Chink with the eyes” and get him mixed up with Youngbae. He doubts some of these people would be able to pick out China and Korea on a map. Some call him the little dragon. He likes that better, because they don’t understand why it makes him smile.

 

He shuffles his cards, and speaks quietly in his accented English. There’s no need to be loud. Guns and engines will do that for him.

 

**VIII. BLUE**

 

“Did they make you shoot the dog?”

 

Jiyong blinks. He’s never had a dog.

 

He nestles his head further into Seungri’s lap. He’s pretty high right now. He’s in a good place.

 

You can’t see a single star in LA. It’s like Seoul, that way.

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“They always make you shoot the dog.”

 

Yawning, he reaches for the cards in his pocket. Seungri’s hand stills him. He really wants to talk about this damn dog.

 

“So, what about your dead dog?”

 

“How old were you when you killed someone for the first time?”

 

Jiyong goes silent. Lets Seungri think about what he’s just asked.

 

He doesn’t apologize, but he goes on. “I shot the dog when I was ten.”

 

“It’s just a dog.”

 

“Like that mattered. I grew up with it. I loved that dog more than my siblings.”

 

“At least you didn’t have to shoot one of them.”

 

“I’d rather have.”

 

“Don’t say stupid things like that. Family is the only thing we have in the world.”

 

He retaliates quickly, “At least you’re something without your family. All I am is an heir.”

 

“And, so? There’s been a lot of kings and royalty in the past, not to mention families like yours—all sorts of dynasties and inheritances. None of those people asked to be heirs, but that was their responsibility to history.”

 

“So you’re saying that’s my role to play.”

 

“Do whatever you’d like. But, if I were in your position, I’d play it close. Deserters tend to get shot.”

 

Seungri laughs softly. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.” After a moment, he continues, “It’s just—cool, I guess, that _hyung_ chose this for himself.”

 

Jiyong sighs, irritated. “Anyone would.”

 

“Then why do most people live the straight life?”

 

“Because they don’t have the talent. Or, mostly, because they’re afraid.”

 

Seungri offers Jiyong the blunt again, but he waves his hand no.

 

The first thing Jiyong shot wasn’t a dog. He doesn’t know what Seungri is complaining about.

 

**IX. BROWN**

 

Jiyong’s on the verge of cabin fever when Daesung spares him.

 

He’s already steeling himself as he drives to the boxing club. Sparring with Daesung is something else. Jiyong has fought all his members before. With Youngbae it’s honest, hard, no-holds-barred, and leaves Jiyong exhausted in body but refreshed of mind. Seunghyun could overwhelm him, but he doesn’t fight seriously, breaking out into jokes and stupid faces too often. And the _maknae_ treats it, like he does everything, as flirtation, the push-pull of power and close bodies just another game with no conclusion.

 

But when he enters the ring with Daesung, Jiyong finds himself fighting for his life.

 

The man gives off the killing intent all the time, wears it like cologne. It calls Jiyong’s bloodlust to the surface, thrumming hot and close in his veins. He fights for all he’s worth.

 

But Daesung always calls off the match when it tilts too far in his favor. He’s never let himself properly beat Jiyong before. Probably, Jiyong thinks, because real victory for Daesung means a corpse.

 

It’s fine. People warn him about Daesung, sometimes. They remind him that no one knows Daesung. Leader smiles faintly and says he’ll be all right; Jiyong thinks that Daesung is more careful with himself than anybody is, because it would be so easy for him to kill somebody.

 

Today Jiyong gets Daesung under his arm. He’s hard to hold onto, bucking like an earthquake in the crook of Jiyong’s elbow. Jiyong gets a glimpse of him.

 

He’s grinning.

 

A strike beneath the jaw, lightning ricocheting through his head. Jiyong goes down half-blacked-out and unable to breathe. He chokes for air. His throat feels shattered.

 

 _He’s on stage. He chokes for air. His throat feels shattered._ _He’s been sick for a week. It’s of no import—he’s Leader. He jumps in the air and screams and the world screams back, so loud the ground quakes. He raises the mike like a scepter, and in the dark a million crowns sway._

 

Daesung hits him hard in the back. Death draws back as his breathing realigns. He wheezes. There is no stage and no scepter. He’s on the floor of the ring and Daesung squats next to him.

 

“Okay?” he asks.

 

He lets Daesung’s hand, firm and sweaty in his, anchor him back to the world.

 

“You should teach me that.”

 

“Sure, _hyung_.”

 

And he does.

 

**X. BLONDE**

 

“We’re in kind of a situation.”

 

Youngbae’s voice floats at him in the dark. Shaking the world. Wake up.

 

He hears a loud thud over the line.

 

It’s just past four in the morning. Jiyong scowls. They got the go tonight, and they start when dawn hits. There’s no time for situations.

 

“And?” he asks.

 

“Seunghyun’s on some bad acid.”

 

Jiyong begins to wake up.

 

“Acid?”

 

“Or something, I don’t know. He’s tripping out.”

 

“Is he there?”

 

“Yeah. I locked him in the bathroom.”

 

Another thud.

 

“Are you hurt?”

 

“Not really.”

 

Not really is still part really. Jiyong claws himself out of sleep.

 

“I don’t know if someone gave it to him or what,” continues Youngbae.

 

“I’m coming over,” says Jiyong shortly. “Text me your address.”

 

He drives over carefully but in a haze. Beneath sunglasses, his eyes are bloodshot. He’d barely been asleep an hour when Youngbae called. The hotel’s notepad bears witness to the restlessness of his mind. The dark ringing his eyes bears witness to the restlessness of his members. It’s of no import—but some nights even Leader feels tired.

 

Youngbae looks about how he feels when he opens the door. Behind him come the systematic crashes of Seunghyun trying to batter his way out of his makeshift cage. The door’s hinges creak.

 

Youngbae’s cheek is swelling up and his eye is dark with blood. “Take care of that,” says Jiyong. He slides up to the door. It jerks beneath his hand.

 

“ _Hyung_?” he calls.

 

The pounding stops for a few seconds, then starts up again.

 

“Where’s the book?”

 

Youngbae nods at the coffee table. “Right there. But you shouldn’t open the door,” he warns.

 

Jiyong knows better than to try. He thinks for a moment.

 

“You have a pen?”

 

He sits with his back against the door. Behind him Seunghyun screams amidst the shatter of glass. Jiyong lowers his head and writes. The story he tells is half-imagined and half-remembered; someone might have spoken it to him lovingly in a softer life. He is in a hurry, but he remembers to start with _once upon a time._ Page by page, he slides it through the breath’s-width gap beneath the door. The pounding continues through pages one and two, so he keeps writing. At five it quiets. At ten Jiyong drops the pen.

 

When he gets up and reaches for the bathroom knob, Youngbae looks at him. He doesn’t say anything.

 

“What time is it?”

 

“Five ten,” says Youngbae.

 

Jiyong bows slightly.

 

“Then, I’ll leave things to you.”

 

In one movement, he opens the door a crack, slides in, and closes it behind him.

 

When Youngbae opens it at six-thirty, he finds Jiyong and Seunghyun curled up inside in a circle of shattered mirror glass. Jiyong’s head lolls against the edge of the bathtub and Seunghyun’s arms are twined firmly around Jiyong’s leg. Seunghyun is snoring. Jiyong breathes quietly. His lashes are startlingly dark and fragile without the ever-present sunglasses there to shield them.

 

Notepad pages lie scattered on the floor. Youngbae picks one of them up.

 

In Jiyong’s handwriting: _once upon a time_

 

He doesn't read any farther; lets it drift back to the ground.

 

He gives them an extra ten minutes, although he knows Leader wouldn’t do the same.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**XI. BLUE**

 

It’s just a girl outside.

 

Jiyong slides his gun back into the holster. It presses between his waistband and his hip in a metal kiss as he unbolts the door.

 

A gift he didn’t ask her. Nevertheless he lets her in, takes her coat, gives her a glass of cold barley tea. When she begins to slide one strap of her dress down, he tells her she can keep it on, “unless you’re warm.” A joke. The air-conditioning is sub-polar. “Stay for however long you’re supposed to,” he says. “You can tell your boss it went well.”

 

He tips her as well, on top of whatever she’s already been paid for this job. Several crisp hundreds to sit, silent and nervous. This one actually falls asleep, felled graceful as a butterfly on the room’s chaise lounge. Collapsed in sleep, her face is unable to sustain the cruel edges of her lipstick and eyelashes. She looks twice the child she is.

 

Jiyong writes a little, smokes. He shuffles his cards and gets through 33 of them. There’s a bad taste lingering in his mouth. He brushes his teeth. The girl shifts, mumbling something in her sleep.

 

Jiyong knows he is speeding towards the edge of youth. Sometime in the next year or two or five, his phone will ring. He will pick up with steady hands and listen to one of the heads gravely inform him that it’s time for him to really join the family. To be bonded in blood, the holiest of ways. A favored daughter’s name will be offered up before him, tender and white as a sacrifice. And Leader will bow his head, and let another part of Jiyong go.

 

He’s cast aside other pieces of himself with less thought. But this is different. It will hurt no matter how he tries to harden himself against it. He can take it. But that doesn’t mean he wants to.

 

For now, he pays these girls luxuriantly for quiet nights. He has told himself time after time that he should get what he pays for. That he must ease into the habit. But Jiyong rebels, the part that still can. He’d rather die of thirst than drink poison.

 

Eventually the girl rouses. As he lets her out, another door down the hallway clicks open. A woman and Seungri spill out still half-joined, laughing.

 

They are tangles of mussed hair and open zippers. They turn and stare at Jiyong and the girl. Their solemn cleanliness. 

 

Jiyong hates how transparent they are.

 

The women go down the hall. After a moment, Seungri comes towards him as well. Fucked-out, half-stumbling with exhaustion. He reeks of sex. His pupils are wild.

 

“Hey, _hyung_.”

 

He stands too close. Jiyong can smell woman all over him.

 

“You have a good time?” he asks tightly.

 

Seungri pisses him off. Everything does. Jiyong is sleep-deprived and sex-starved, so horny he could bite himself. He is coiled like a snake waiting for prey, wound like a muscle mid-seizure. The _maknae_ has the audacity to stand there loose-limbed and sleepy and high while Jiyong cannot remember the last time he _relaxed_.

 

“Yeah,” says Seungri. He sways and dips in towards Jiyong.

 

Jiyong has seen Seungri play this game before. This play of being drunker, higher, stupider than he really is. A performance meant for one.

 

If Jiyong’s being honest with himself, Jiyong wants to bury his fist in Seungri’s collar. He wants to hiss in his pretty pierced ear, _I’m not one of your stupid girlfriends_. He wants to pull at the thin gold chain at his neck like it’s a leash and watch Seungri go down.

 

_Maknae_ smiles lopsided and butts his sweat-soaked head into Jiyong’s shoulder. Jiyong shakes.

 

His glance is cool, ice-blue. He’s left his contacts in.

 

“And you, _hyung_?” he asks.

 

In an instant Jiyong has him by the throat. He’s dragging him without thought or reason, throwing him against the hotel wall, setting his teeth in his collarbone and his shoulder and his throat while Seungri falls apart perfectly beneath him. They barely get inside before they’re fucking like someone’s got a gun to their heads, like they’d die without. Jiyong is so high off the way that Seungri’s mouth falls open below him that he feels faint. His body can’t keep up with his need. It’s tearing apart in a mess of strained muscle and ringing vision and blood on his lip from where he’s bitten himself into quiet, and the closer he gets the closer death draws, licking wet against the back of his neck as he drips sweat. Its hands are on him and so are Seungri’s and Jiyong can’t tell the difference with his eyes shut, Jiyong’s panting without breathing, he’s moving like a machine with its knob turned to the highest setting, overheating and trembling and threatening to fly into pieces. The sounds that punch through him like bullets do not exist in this room: bellowing train, tattoo needle, still air on the moon, venus fly trap fluttering shut, pistol slide clicking back. And behind it all, a roar like a wave, rumbling slowly forwards from a great distance and gathering in the dark to loom over him ten-thousand feet tall as the crowns sway, nodding to the guillotine to hurry up and fall.

 

There are hands on his face and a voice around his neck. “ _Hyung_. _Hyung—_ Jiyong. Look at me.”

 

Jiyong forces his eyes open and looks at the distorted world like it’s through the bottom of a wineglass. There’s blue at the center. Seungri. He feels very distant but the hands are still there, pulling him down.

 

“Come back,” Seungri says.

 

Jiyong stills for a moment.

 

And, after all, his heart still beats, and he can still feel. Sheets, air, flesh. Because, after all, he’s not a conduit or a weapon or a nightmare. He’s human.

 

He goes over the edge with his hands locked around Seungri’s wrists like they’ll keep everything at bay, and Seungri holds him the whole way down, and Jiyong tumbles straight from the high into sleep so sweet and deep that it is like dying.

 

Obviously, he’s allowed himself to be a little careless. He jolts awake just past five with the _maknae_ ’s head against his shoulder and their ankles crossed. His entire body feels shattered.

 

He leaves Seungri to sleep in his room and drags himself into Seungri’s.

 

Jiyong has never spent a morning with a man in his arms before. He doesn’t intend to start now. He doesn’t think he’d be able to go back afterwards.

 

When they’re all up, Daesung has a good laugh at Seungri. “Look… he’s so messed up…”

 

“There’s no shame in having a good time.”

 

“Uh huh. Drink more egg,” says Seunghyun. He nudges Seungri’s glass of Prairie Oyster and pulls a gagging face.

 

“If you enjoy yourself like that all the time you’re going to send yourself to an early grave,” Daesung reprimands.

 

“Eh. I’m an energetic person.”

 

Jiyong eats nothing and drinks coffee. He hides the puffy bloodshot look of his eyes beneath the sunglasses.

 

One person, at least, is not fooled. Youngbae knows how Jiyong is with women. Youngbae also sees how Jiyong looks right now.

 

He says nothing. Without being asked, he slides a packet or two of sugar over to Jiyong.

 

**XII. WHITE**

 

Youngbae slows down when he sees the basketball court.

 

“Come on,” he says.

 

“What?”

 

“One v one. Let’s go.”

 

“Are you serious?” The car is at the curb now, and Youngbae turns the engine off. “Where’re you going to get a basketball from?”

 

Grinning, Youngbae pops the trunk and pulls one out from behind the aluminum briefcase. His car is a treasure trove in more ways than one.

 

“Come on,” he says again.

 

He’s already trotting towards the net. There aren’t many people who don’t wait for Jiyong. Jiyong appreciates Youngbae for this.

 

He gets out of the car. Scans the surroundings, high-alert a habit. There’s nothing, not even a stray dog's bark. Above him the sodium street lamps hum steadily, and very far away, the 10 freeway rumbles.

 

Automatically his mind constructs the worst-case scenarios: a resident looks down from her balcony and her eye catches on the odd sight of two men in suits and dress shoes playing basketball at 5 in the morning, a homeless man memorizes the plate of their car, a yawning cop duo drives by on their way to coffee and brings the squad car to a halt with a screech.

 

Jiyong licks his lips. He’s getting nervous. Caution, not paranoia. He’s on the verge of calling it off, even if the briefcase in the car is nothing but a decoy weighted with electronics and clothes.

 

Then Youngbae swivels and tosses the ball at him, and Jiyong crouches and catches it low, near the pit of his belly. 

 

He follows his lead.

 

Youngbae is better than him, but Jiyong’s more awake. He takes advantage of Youngbae’s sleepy shuffle, slides close to the net, feints right, bounces the ball off the backboard and barely makes it through the hoop. “Ah,” complains Youngbae, annoyed, and Jiyong takes off his sunglasses because it makes it easier to see. Their jackets go next, cashmere on grimy bench, Jiyong’s folded neatly and Youngbae’s discarded in a heap. In the end they’re playing in their shirtsleeves, dribbling the ball and sweat with buttons popped.

 

Once upon a time, Youngbae had held a kid down while Jiyong punched his teeth loose for losing the neighborhood ball in the street and getting it run over by a car. It had cost 5000 won and it was worth everything in the world. Now they play the same game with a briefcase meant to look like it carries a million dollars idling fifty feet away in a Bentley. 

 

Jiyong carries his history inside himself like a series of nesting dolls, and he thinks the child at its heart wouldn’t recognize the man who faces outwards now. For the money, the soul, the things he has done. He wouldn’t even dare look him in the eye.

 

Introspection erodes alertness. Youngbae slaps the ball away from him mid-dribble. He lopes easily down the undefended thigh of the court and slams his goal home.

 

“Hah,” he laughs, and points finger-guns at Jiyong, shooting one-two. “Bang, bang, motherfucker.” 

 

Jiyong laughs and raises his hands to his heart as his holster presses into his side.

 

Dawn rises like a curtain over them. One sodium light blinks off, then the other.

 

Jiyong catches his breath. Slides his sunglasses back on.

 

**XIII. BLONDE**

 

“This feels bad.”

 

Jiyong looks sharply at Seunghyun.

 

“Any reason why?”

 

Seunghyun shakes his head. This is usually the response. Seunghyun doesn’t deal in reasons like Jiyong does, doesn’t calculate and plan. His is a darker animal sense, bred in some predawn prehistoric era when humanity’s only thought was to survive.

 

Jiyong leans farther over the balcony’s gold railing. The casino floor bustles like a beehive below. The seduction and intoxication of risk pulses through the place like cognac. There are too many people for him to track.

 

He jogs down the grand staircase, Seunghyun close behind.

 

They weave through the tables of laughter and dice. He’d joke about Seunghyun counting cards to net them some extra cash, but it’s a moot point. Their oldest is no Rain Man. His gift is people. Faces, places, voices, histories—all of it is sucked as relentlessly into the infinitely deep vault of Seunghyun’s mind as sound into a microphone.

 

It can be hard to kill a man you know well. Certainly it is more difficult to shoot him when you can see his wife and children echoed in his begging eyes. Yet Seunghyun knows everything about everyone and would knife you in the back at the turn of a mood. This is his danger.

 

There’s Seungri, deep in a game of roulette with a beauty on his arm. Jiyong sails right by. He feels Seungri’s eyes snag on him like fish on a hook. 

 

Seunghyun grins at the youngest as he passes. Briefly raises one hand in greeting.

 

Probably, Seunghyun knows. It is wiser to assume he notices everything. Again, a moot point. It is only when Jiyong stops trusting Seunghyun that Seunghyun will do the same. Until then, this secret will lie like all the others Seunghyun has regarding Jiyong, inert and cold, guns with empty chambers.

 

This, in the end, is love. Getting close enough to someone to knife them in the ribs, and stopping. And then doing the same, day after day after day.

 

Seunghyun is sticking close, close enough to knife him or shield him. Jiyong’s stomach tightens. That means Jiyong is another one of Seunghyun’s instincts. Something, somewhere in that perpetually twilit mind, has fired; some quick transfer of chemicals has raced from deep inside the maze to the surface to alert Seunghyun that Jiyong will need someone at his back soon.

 

At the bar, Jiyong buys Seunghyun a drink.

 

“ _Hyung_ is making me nervous,” he says.

 

Seunghyun grins and swivels on the bar stool like a child. “Everyone’s having fun.”

 

“Looks like it.”

 

“‘Gri’s having fun.”

 

“He has too much fun.”

 

“But people shouldn’t drink too much. They’ll be hungover tomorrow.”

 

“You don’t get hungover, though.”

 

Seunghyun smiles again. “I’m sharp,” he says, touching his temple.

 

He is, and he sticks by Jiyong like a shadow.

 

Jiyong is glad of it later, when the bullets begin.

 

**XIV. BROWN**

 

Jiyong has been shot before.

 

That doesn’t make this time any more pleasant.

 

He doesn’t know where he is. He’s getting blood all over the place. Someone hands him a wad of cloth and tells him to hold it against the wound, so he does, gritting his teeth as pulses of pain play his ribs like a xylophone.

 

Someone surges into his line of vision. Jiyong raises himself a few inches. “Where’s the case?” he demands.

 

“‘Gri has it.”

 

“Police?” 

 

“We shook them off.”

 

They got away, then. Just as planned. Jiyong breathes hard through his nose. His skin is chalky beneath the blood. He tells himself that the pain is part of the plan too. The lie helps, a bit.

 

“We should move.”

 

“Can’t.”

 

Where?

 

“We’re in a safehouse.”

 

Liar. In hiding’s more like it. Daesung’s sweat thumps to the floor beside Jiyong’s ear.

 

He helps him drink a little water. It tastes like metal.

 

The tape skips forwards. He is beginning to lose time.

 

“Try and stay with me.”

 

“Yeah,” he murmurs. The pain surges sickeningly through him. Even though he’s flat on the floor he feels dizzy. Voices crackle through the air. He’s hallucinating again—or, no—a walkie-talkie, and Daesung’s voice, low and urgent.

 

He thinks of where each of his men should be. He imagines them moving across the desert West in miniature, silver Monopoly men on a gameboard. Youngbae the automobile, Seunghyun the terrier, _maknae_ the top hat, debonair and beautiful.

 

He hopes Daesung isn’t the wheelbarrow. Wheelbarrows are too useful for moving bodies.

 

He wonders if they hit an artery.

 

Jiyong doesn’t want to be reincarnated.

 

The crowns are back again.

 

“What does a _stage_ mean to you?”

 

“ _Stage_ …?” Daesung huffs and his bangs reveal his eyes for an instant before settling back down. “It’s a place where things go exactly as planned.”

 

“Because everyone knows their role.”

 

“That’s right.”

 

“I don’t like stages much.”

 

“Neither do I.”

 

“Hey.”

 

“Hm?”

 

“Go.”

 

He laughs. “You know I’m no good for that, _hyung_.”

 

“ _Go._ ”

 

“Aren’t you trying to put me in a role?”

 

“Yes,” he says. He is Leader.

 

Daesung ignores him. “How’re you feeling?”

 

“Shit.”

 

“Good. When you stop feeling anything, that’s when I get worried.” He dribbles a little more water in his mouth.

 

“Thirsty,” complains Jiyong. Daesung presses him gently back to the ground and says, “Five more minutes. Just five minutes.”

 

_Who do you think,_ thinks Jiyong, but he lies back anyway, because it’s easier.

 

“Here—put your feet up.”

 

“Mm. Where’s the case?”

 

“With Seungri.”

 

“Where’s Seungri?”

 

After a second, Daesung says, “Gone.”

 

“We’ve got the decoy.”

 

“We’ve got the decoy.”

 

“Good,” says Jiyong.

 

Blank, again. Jiyong is fuzzy. Jiyong surges back to the surface.

 

“Where’s the book?” he demands.

 

And why? Why is Daesung looking at him like that?

 

He’s got his hand on Jiyong’s forehead.

 

“Ah, _hyung_ ,” he says quietly.

 

“’s… it?”

 

“Seunghyun has it.”

 

_Liar._

 

No one knows where the book is but Jiyong.

 

Not even Seunghyun.

 

“Daesung,” he ventures.

 

“Yes.”

 

“We need to move soon.”

 

“All right.”

 

The tape skips, spins, tangles. No rewind.

 

**XV. PINK**

 

**Blackness**.

 

_All right. Good set, guys, good set. ‘Gri, you killed it out there._

 

_Killed it? Isn’t that a bit ungenerous?_

 

_C’mon, oppa. You know you’re the best._

 

_Oh, I thought you were. At least, that’s what you always say._

 

_Guys. GD has the stage in five. You can argue later. GD, man, you’re wired up?_

 

_Check._

 

_All right._

 

_GD-oppa! Fighting!_

 

_Shut up._

 

_It’s time._

 

_It’s time._

 

**Blackness**.

 

_Hyung? Can I come in?_

 

_You didn’t eat yet, right? I brought you some stuff._

 

_Ah, hyung, how’re you still up? It’s late. We have to get up early for the show tomorrow._

 

_Yeah, I know the album won’t write itself, but the deadline’s still a long ways away._

 

_I know, but you have to take care of yourself._

 

_Well, I don’t like having to nag you about this stuff either._

 

_All right, I’ll get out of here. But just eat two bites? Please? I really made it myself. I’m not joking._

 

_See, you like it. Told you._

 

_Yeah, yeah, I know I’m the mother hen. If you all weren’t such babies, I wouldn’t have to be._

 

_Okay. Okay._

 

_Good night, hyung._

 

_Good night, hyung._

 

**Blackness**.

 

_No, listen. Would you—stop laughing. I’m not that drunk! Seriously! You’re the one in the bag, Jiyong. You’re totally sloshing right now._

 

_But listen, seriously. Like, it’s crazy, what you do. Being in the studio like this, I remember that this is where it all happens. The shows are the afterparty, you know? Like, I know we had an afterparty, but that was like an after-afterparty. If you know what I mean._

 

_Really, listen, though. Your writing. Watching you get in that headspace, get into that mindset… I’m like, what the fuck. Seriously, man. You’ve got talent. I—yeah, I know you hear this a lot. But it’s true. For someone, for someone like me, that doesn’t have that_ thing _. It’s crazy just to see it. Just to be in the room when it happens, to have some part of that._

 

_I guess I’m just trying to say that I respect you a lot. I’m never going to say this shit on any kind of broadcast even once. Don’t even think about it. So listen well, right now. Okay, Jiyong? I’m never going to say this again!_

 

_But, seriously, you’re the best, man._

 

_King, forever._

 

_King, forever._

 

**Blackness.**

 

_So I heard you’re getting engaged, Youngbae._

 

_No, really. That’s what I’ve heard._

 

_You’re saying it isn’t true?_

 

_Ah, see. What did I say._

 

_No, I’m not going to tell you who said. I’ve gotta keep my sources confidential, man._

 

_Congratulations, though. Best wishes and everything._

 

_What? I am happy for you. It’s just sudden, that’s all. And, I guess the band ends here as well._

 

_No. No, come on. You can’t come with us and we can’t go on without you. It’s the same with you as with any of us. All for one, and all that._

 

_What’re you sorry for? Hurry up and get married, for Christ’s sake. And I’m best man or I’ll fight someone for it._

 

_Yeah. Yeah, man. Really, though, it’s crazy. We were kids like, five minutes ago. And now it’s like this._

 

_Uh huh._

 

_I love you too, man._

 

_Ah, don’t be like that. What’re you sounding so sad for?_

 

_We had a good run._

 

_We had a good run._

 

**Blackness.**

 

[ _And today, the news that’s taking over the music industry: the beloved K-pop group Big Bang has announced that they’re disbanding at the end of the year. Although the band has yet to give an official explanation, the most likely reason is the recent engagement of member Taeyang, which was announced last month. The reaction among fans has been enormous. In their 12-year run, Big Bang has truly redefined the musical image of Korea, as well as making their mark on the world. The group was formed in 2006 after]—_

 

**Blackness.**

 

**Blackness.**

 


	4. Chapter 4

**XVI. WHITE**

 

“Hello?”

 

“You’re not getting married, are you?”

 

“—What?”

 

“I had a dream.”

 

“…For God’s sake, Jiyong.”

 

Jiyong shifts his phone to his other ear. He can envision it so well. Youngbae scrubbing his blocky hands over his face. Voice scratchy and posture quiet, the way he gets when he’s tired.

 

Youngbae is like his voice, is like his hands. Solid, reliable. Hardened but still honest, still somehow honest. He handles cars and Jiyong and god well. Them and all the wild things.

 

Jiyong has always loved Youngbae more closely than he loves himself.

 

He closes his eyes. His voice sounds closer in the dark. If it weren’t for the static Jiyong could almost forget the ten-thousand kilometers between them. 

 

“So you’re not.”

 

“I’m not. Let me just—we can talk about this after I appreciate the fact that you’re alive.”

 

“You haven’t appreciated it much for about the last ten years.”

 

“Yeah, well, you weren’t getting shot at for the last ten years. At least not all of it. Where are you, anyway?”

 

“Back in Korea. Cooped up in some mob doctor’s house. I lie in bed all day. It’s driving me nuts. I’m thinking of doing a prison break.”

 

“Sure. You’d better make sure you can walk before you try breaking anywhere.”

 

“Daesung’ll help me.”

 

“He’s around?”

 

“He flew back with me. Youngbae, where are you? I’m on a secure line right now.”

 

“…Why do you have to be on a secure line for me to tell you?”

 

“Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.”

 

Jiyong shifts and his crutch digs into his left armpit. Beneath the thin ice of pain medication, the ache in his leg runs deep. It’ll be too many weeks until he can walk properly again, let alone run. 

 

Wincing, he breathes through his teeth. “They know about the case,” he continues conversationally.

 

Silence.

 

Youngbae is waiting for him to elaborate. But there’s nothing more to say.

 

“So that’s the way it is,” he says eventually.

 

“That’s the way it is.”

 

“The boss hasn’t said anything to me yet.”

 

“If he’s close enough to say anything, you’d better be running.”

 

A cloud passes over in Korea. Youngbae sounds colder over the line.

 

“You really think it’s like that, Jiyong?”

 

“I don’t know for sure.”

 

“But you have a feeling.”

 

Jiyong swallows quickly. His mouth has gone sandpaper. “There’s no time,” he says curtly. “Is Seunghyun there?”

 

“I can get a hold of him.”

 

“He’s going to have to cut the book open. Tell him sorry for me.”

 

“Wh—”

 

Jiyong hangs up on Youngbae. He does it brutally, before sentimentality and the better part of two decades get to him. He kills the line between them like he’s slitting a throat. 

 

Youngbae must be Leader, now.

 

Sometimes you and your brother ride the wasteland like kings, and sometimes you scream at the sky, and sometimes you look at one another and see god in the thing between you that you have built.

 

Sometimes, too, you and your brother part.

 

Oftentimes there’s no chance for goodbyes.

 

**XVII. BLONDE**

 

Three years ago:

 

Those were the young days, the top-of-the-world days. Jiyong’s men scattered and feasted on the tender thigh flesh of civilization. They howled at the sun and rolled time into cigarillos and they took the drugs to make their bodies felt how their minds did. Blown wide-open and so sensitive that every footstep held the edge of a climax.

 

But Leader, Leader smiles thinly and Leader says little. He is in the grip of rare love; dark love, strong love. He has fallen as helplessly as a little child falls down upon the sidewalk—and he has fallen for his killers, his wolves.

 

When Jiyong was a child he thought he would care for nothing and live forever. Now he cares too much and death moves next door, downstairs, across the hall. It paces across the ceiling of his eyelids every time he tries to sleep and reminds him that nobody can live perfectly, and that it only takes one mistake.

 

So Jiyong does not fight death. That’s a fool’s game. Rather, Jiyong plots around him. He treads softly and politely and carefully. He bows and palms guns and knives behind his back. Because Jiyong is only a man but Jiyong is clever and persistent and bites into his ideas like a dog into bone, and in love, Jiyong is discovering, he is to be reckoned with.

 

Three years ago, he’s in the middle of stitching the book back up when the eldest calls. Jiyong lays his phone on the sand and switches it to speakerphone as he continues to work. He’s surprised he even has signal out here. There’s nobody around for miles; only the moon and the Southern night are present to eavesdrop.

 

“Hello,” he says.

 

“Ah. Jiyong. It’s Jiyong, right?”

 

“Who else would be picking up my phone?” Seunghyun’s voice crumbles in bits and pieces over the line. Even then he sounds unsteady. “Are you drunk? You sound drunk.”

 

“Hmmm,” Seunghyun hums. “Ji-yo-ng. Where are you?”

 

“Argentina.”

 

“ _Aish._ What even happens in Argentina, anyway. Are you riding a turtle?”

 

“People anywhere don’t do that.”

 

“You are near the ocean, though.”

 

“ _Hyung_ is sharp as ever.”

 

“It’s the waves. I can hear them. It should be early there.”

 

“So early it’s late, actually. It’s two or three at night.”

 

“That’s not so bad. So what’s up?”

 

“Well, I’m sitting on a beach right now. I don’t see any turtles.”

 

“I’d settle for sharks.”

 

“Maybe. It’s dark out. I wouldn’t be able to see them.”

 

“Don’t go into the water, then.”

 

“The water’s a bad situation.”

 

“And are you safe?”

 

“I’m not in the water, if that’s what you mean.” 

 

But he is. He’s neck-deep and going under, and he’s prepared to swim. Jiyong shoves the needle through one last time and inspects his handiwork in the moonlight. The cover doesn’t look any thicker than before, despite its new payload. Five thin rubber-banded bundles.

 

It has taken Jiyong most of two years to sort those bundles out. Five hundred days and five hundred late nights and who knows how many close-mouthed smiles, miles traveled, pounds of stress.

 

After all that, they seem too small to carry the weight of their own history. He reaches for the glue to finish the job. “Why, are you telling me I should be worried?”

 

“ _I’m_ worried, everybody’s worried. You sneaking off like this… Even Youngbae had no idea where you were. He figured Macau.” Jiyong hears Seunghyun stumble into something. He sneezes and continues. “’Gri called me last night. _All_ the way from the Monte Carlo. He wanted to know where you were. Why you weren’t picking up his calls.”

 

“You know how _maknae_ ’s clingy. Tell him to gamble some more.”

 

“There’s no point. He won’t forget about you even if you tell him to go away.”

 

“Then you can let him know that I’ll be back in Seoul soon. If he wants to sneak by.”

 

“You’re saying it like a joke, but he’ll do it.”

 

“That’s fine. It’ll be a nice change of pace for him, wasting his money on something other than women and drugs. Maybe he’ll sober up on the plane ride.”

 

A lull.

 

“Jiyong,” Seunghyun says. “You have my book.”

 

“I do,” he answers baldly. Seunghyun can always tell if Jiyong lies to him, and that’ll just make him angry, which will make him reckless, which will mean more trouble for Jiyong when he gets back to Korea.

 

“I needed it the other night.”

 

“…Ah, _hyung._ Keep saying scary things and you’ll take five years off my life. Don’t tell me you killed somebody or something.”

 

“ _No,_ ” he says, testy. “But I didn’t know you’d be gone for so long.”

 

“Sorry. Bear with it a while longer.”

 

“What the hell are you doing in Argentina, really?”

 

After a moment, Jiyong says, “Pass. _Hyung,_ I can’t—”

 

“You always say the same thing to us before jobs. ‘Look out for yourself first.’”

 

“That’s—”

 

“But you watch for us,” Seunghyun says heatedly. “Too much.”

 

“I try for the right amount.”

 

“Too much,” he insists. “We all think so.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“You’re not.”

 

“ _Eoh_ , that’s true.”

 

“To be honest, Jiyong—”

 

“Go ahead, _hyung_.”

 

“—you’re the most annoying when you keep secrets.”

 

Jiyong smiles slightly.

 

“You’re not going to say anything, are you.” Seunghyun sighs. “Whatever. I don’t have to tell you to be careful. And bring that thing back soon, or you might have some bodies to clean up.”

 

Before he hangs up, Jiyong says quickly, _“Hyung_.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

 _“_ I want us all to live. That’s why…”

 

“Huh? Somebody’s trying to kill us?”

 

“Everything is always trying to kill us.”

 

“ _Aish._ Come back quickly,” Seunghyun repeats. “Don’t be sad like that. Sitting by yourself in the middle of the night, being paranoid. Besides, it’s easier to get killed that way.”

 

“Maybe."

 

"Feel better."

 

"I do. Good night,  _hyung_."

 

“Night, Jiyong.”

 

**XVIII. BROWN**

 

The voices of the choir rise around them like ghosts from water.

 

Daesung grins, boyish.

 

“We’re like the Boondocks,” he whispers.

 

Jiyong takes off his sunglasses. He looks at the stained glass.

 

Flying back with Daesung is hazy in Jiyong’s memory. Crammed into economy for the sake of a low profile, Jiyong raging with fever and sky-high on pain meds while he’d looped every half hour or so between drugged-out giggling, pain, and uneasy sleep while Daesung kicked at his ankle to keep him quiet.

 

Maybe God is really here, somewhere between the singing and the gilt cross. Maybe he whispers secrets between the lines of the pastor’s speech. But Jiyong can’t sense it.

 

If Jiyong has witnessed a higher power, it lies in whatever thing makes five men together greater than five men apart.

 

He listens to the sermon with half an ear. Thinks of what remains to be done.

 

When the service ends they exit with the rest of the flock, wandering blinking into the sunlight. Daesung lights a cigarette. Jiyong leans against the church wall.

 

He watches the families. They look like zoo animals, like aliens. They trill goodbye to one other as joyously as rainforest birds.

 

“When I was little,” Daesung says, “I burned down a church like this.”

 

Nobody knows Daesung, and Daesung never, ever talks about himself.

 

“Why?”

 

“I didn’t want to believe in God. They tried to make me. But I was a wolf, not a sheep like the other kids. So I stole some gasoline and set God on fire and ran away. And I didn’t think about him for a long time.

 

“But, you know, something crazy happened when I was hiding out with you. You were bleeding a lot and before I even knew it, I was praying in my head. ‘Please God, please God. Save him.’

 

“Later I thought, damn, I guess he got me anyway. The bastard. I guess I couldn’t burn him down. But then I thought, isn’t it the choice that makes the difference?”

 

Daesung lets his cigarette fall. The grass begins to smolder.

 

“The things people say you’re meant for, you can make them your own. You can free yourself in the end. Maybe it’s the only way to free yourself.”

 

He brings his heel down. The fire goes out, and death passes. The families will trill on and spin on. Their fragile soap-bubble lives will continue another day in the rough winds and the sun.

 

Jiyong thinks, _good_. Let them go on into infinity. He wishes them all the happiness in the world. The meek shall inherit.

 

“Because we’re humans,” Daesung says. “We have a memory. And we can never abandon the things that have passed.”

 

Jiyong wonders. He wonders if he can ever be free of the blood in his veins, the blood on his hands, the blood he has chosen and the blood he has shed.

 

“So?” he asks. “Do you think god saved me?”

 

Daesung flashes a smile at him. It shines even in the shade. 

 

“Man, the day God lifts a finger for a sinner like you, I’m quitting this thing. Shit’s too crazy to deal.”

 

Jiyong laughs.

 

He’d thought as much.

 

He hands Daesung his notebook, then.

 

“What’s this?”

 

“Keep it for me,” says Jiyong.

 

There were four sets in Seunghyun’s book, and one in Jiyong’s notebook for himself. But Daesung is here, not there.

 

Things never go as planned. So it goes.

 

**XIX.PINK**

 

Jiyong smells the boss before he sees him. In three years his taste in import cigars hasn’t changed.

 

He’s out of the bed before the door opens. By holding onto the bedframe, he manages a bow.

 

The boss inflates into the room like a balloon, stealing all the air. Jiyong is used to it. 

 

“Well,” he rasps. “You’re looking chipper. Shouldn’t you be lounging around convalescing with a pretty nurse on your arm or something?”

 

“Sir, there’s no nurses here and the doctor is a good man but not much to look at.”

 

He wheezes in laughter. “Sit back down, before you fall over.”

 

Jiyong does, but he remains as upright as he can. The boss is giving off a certain mood. Jiyong is wary.

 

“I don’t like to talk business with you right away, Jiyong-ah.”

 

“Whatever you’d like.”

 

“Well, I’ll tell you what’s been bothering me and we’ll see if you can’t help me with it. My problem, not to put too fine of a point on it, is that all your boys have vanished, one way or another. I can’t get ahold of one of them to save my life.”

 

“I’m sorry for their tardiness in responding to you.”

 

“Oh, they’re a bunch of wild dogs, as always. But tell me, have you talked to any of them lately?”

 

“Only Daesung.”

 

“That’s right. He was here for a while. But he’s gone too, it seems.”

 

“It seems so.”

 

“So you don’t know where they are.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

“I see. That’s too bad. You see, it’s just that case! It’s really such a pity that it got lost like that. Right at the last minute—totally botched the whole job. Now, of course, if all of you had gotten caught by the cops, it would’ve been worse. In a situation where nobody can escape, I agree, ditching the case and escaping would be better. What I’m surprised at is that such a situation came up. Your crew have always been such professionals—but I don’t have to explain this to you.”

 

“As their leader, I take full responsibility.”

 

“You couldn’t lead them out of this mess, though. You were too busy getting shot. I heard you came close to dying.”

 

“I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

 

“That’s what I heard. I heard that if you hadn’t gotten picked up as quickly as you did, I wouldn’t have the pleasure of this conversation. Youngbae came to get you, Jiyong-ah. Do you remember that much?”

 

“I’m afraid I don’t, sir.”

 

“He did. He drove right over. Of course, he’d already lost the case by then, so there was no reason he shouldn’t do so.”

 

“I’m very thankful to him.”

 

“You should thank him properly. If you see him again.”

 

“I hope I do, sir.”

 

“You can’t be sure, though.”

 

Jiyong bows his head slightly.

 

“Such a pity,” the boss says again. “I wish I could just ask them one more time what happened with that case. That damned case!”

 

A very long quiet follows.

 

“What’s on your mind?” the boss asks.

 

“Sir, I don’t want to presume.”

 

“Go ahead and say it.”

 

“Please prepare well if you’re going to kill me. I’m going to put up a fight, and I’d hate to cause you any more trouble than I already have.”

 

After he says this, the boss’ face goes totally blank. He looks peaceful as a stone Buddha’s, his expression almost sleepy. Jiyong looks into his eyes and reads the end of his life’s lease. Nevertheless his mind is uncharacteristically silent. If he hears anything it is the faint, years-old crash of waves on the beach, the night Seunghyun called him. The conversation they never spoke of again, and all the things that have passed since then. 

 

The smile cracks the boss’ face like lightning cracks the sky. 

 

“I hope you survive another twenty years, Jiyong-ah, if just so you can stand here one day and listen to your juniors give you lip.”

 

“My apologies, sir.”

 

“Rest up. Enjoy the break. Then you’re to go back to America. Your boys are waiting for you. Wherever the hell they are.”

 

“Understood.”

 

“And learn some respect.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Good God. The mouth on this kid. I’ll never see the end of it.”

 

Leader bows deeply.

 

Jiyong breathes.

 

**XX. BLUE**

 

LAX is in nosebleed weather, dry and blistering. The low sun and smog floods the arrivals terminal with gold. People’s shadows swim through the orange haze like fish. Around him the last bits of Korean chatter scatter and fade into the smell of exhaust and french fries.

 

Jiyong’s head is thick. On the plane the sun outside his window had risen for four hours straight. He has been muddled by time.

 

“Jiyong.”

 

Still, it’s too early to be dreaming.

 

He squints through the glare.

 

There’s a boy in a suit, slim and tall and smiling with his blue, blue eyes. He stands with his hands in his pockets. He waits for Jiyong like it’s the only thing he has to do in the world.

 

Jiyong gets close and hisses, “Why’re you here?”

 

“Why not, _hyung_?”

 

“Don’t fuck with me.”

 

As he speaks, Jiyong is busy looking everywhere in the station. Some people walk by too quickly, others too slow. Jiyong’s heart beats hard and he is irate, because all he wants to do is to look at Seungri. All he wants is to bring him down with his eyes.

 

Seungri should be in Argentina. South Africa. Laos. He should be out of Jiyong’s damned reach. Safe.

 

“Mathematics,” _maknae_ says.

 

“Mathematics.”

 

“Arithmetic.” He holds up his fingers as he talks. “Four sets in America, minus three members, equals one extra. But the extra was in Korea. And I couldn’t balance the equation.”

 

“You’ve always sucked at math.”

 

“You’re right there, _hyung_ , but I managed to figure this one out. It’s an inequality.”

 

“Your brain’s the thing unequal to the situation.”

 

“You gave Daesung yours, though. Right?” He doesn’t wait for Jiyong to answer. “And what were you planning to do after that? Who exactly is the one who’s unequal?”

 

“So?” asks Jiyong. He’s just as aggressive. He’s running on jet lag and plane fumes. He still hasn’t quite realized he’s alive. He’s impatient. “Tell me your plan, _maknae_.”

 

“I don’t have much of a plan. It’s more of a waiting game. I’m playing a plus-one, waiting for a negative.”

 

“I’m not going to play.”

 

“Clearly. You’re here. It’s over.”

 

“You think you’ve won?”

 

“No.”

 

Seungri looks at him so fucking honestly. His heart is not on his sleeve but in Jiyong’s hand, and Seungri was the one to put it there.

 

Jiyong really doesn’t know how he lasted five minutes in this business.

 

He supposes he does have the best _hyung_ to protect him.

 

Seungri palms the documents from beneath his jacket. His hand is warm on Jiyong’s as he passes them over.

 

“You’re the winner. Zero-sum,” he says.

 

His voice is far too gentle. Jiyong’s used to being handled roughly. If someone is gentle with him he thinks he’ll break.

 

He blinks and looks away.

 

“You dyed your hair, _maknae_.”

 

“I did.” Seungri primps like he always does. Maybe Jiyong can begin to believe that they’re alive. “Does it look good?”

 

“You don’t need me to tell you that.”

 

“You think this is pretty, wait until we get outside.”

 

The Lamborghini waiting outside is a gorgeous newborn white thing, crouched like a snow leopard at the curb, windows rolled down and blasting a dance song about shooting people, about fucking people, an invitation at 136 beats per minute. Traffic in nearby lanes has slowed to a crawl as people roll down their windows to gawk and snap photos. And the publicity, the security risk, it’s so fucking uncareful—

 

But Seungri isn’t looking at them. He looks at Jiyong and Jiyong only.

 

“You like?”

 

It’s difficult to keep from smiling. Jiyong manages it.

 

“It’s alright.”

 

He likes better the way Seungri opens the door for him. Even better the way he tastes when they kiss inside.

 

_Fin._

**Author's Note:**

> this fic owes a heavy debt of gratitude to Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs.


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